Elizabeth Bishop: Description Hall of Fame

The poet Elizabeth Bishop is a great describer and belongs in the Pantheon of Describers on High, eternally, if any such thing exists. Very often her work registers the experience of crossing into unfamiliar territory; her senses come to attention in foreign places. I found this description of her visit to a Chinese laundry ("Seven-Days Monologue," The Library of America, Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters):

The father was making out accounts in a black note-book,--erect lines of Chinese lettering. He had a little round wooden dish of black paint and a fine brush on a white handle. On the wall is a large calendar, just the ordinary girl kind, but she's a Chinese girl and all the printing is Chinese. The walls are bright blue.

There was a lighted candle beside the father's note-book, and it had burned down on one side and left a thin shell of wax on the other. The hollow was full of light, like an ice cavern lit by its own midnight sun.

My favorite part is the description of the candle. I didn't like "midnight sun" until I looked it up to make sure I knew exactly what it meant and what she meant. From Wiki:

The midnight sun is a natural phenomenon occurring in summer months at latitudes north and nearby to the south of the Arctic Circle, and south and nearby to the north of the Antarctic Circle where the sun remains visible at the local midnight. Given fair weather, the sun is visible for a continuous 24 hours, mostly north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle. The number of days per year with potential midnight sun increases the farther poleward one goes.

Masters of Description: Colette & Farrer

Though I have no plans to teach, I've been putting together readings for a course I'd call "Description," in which students would merely describe. I shouldn't use the word "merely," a word hardly applicable to writers like Colette and Reginald Farrer, the great British plantsman I learned about in Mark Doty's blog. To write as Colette and Farrer do takes a complete self-forgetfulness--never mind if Colette's hip is aching or Farrer is combing his moustache over his repaired hare lip--and at the same time the power to gather the must acute attention and fix it on the object to be described.

In China he discovered the wild tree peony:

Here in the brushwood it grew up tall and slender and straight, in two or three unbranching shoots, each one of which carried at the top, elegantly balancing, that single enormous blossom, waved and crimped into the boldest grace of line, of absolutely pure white, with featherings of deepest maroon radiating at the base of the petals from the boss of golden fluff at the flower's heart. Above the sere and thorny scrub the snowy beauties poise and hover, and the breath of them went out upon the twilight as sweet as any rose.

Though Farrer's ode to the peony is justly well known, my favorite is his description of Primula secundiflora:

The outside of the bell is of a waxen dulled flesh-colour, filmed with a strange powdery bloom, and suffused with lines and nerves and flushings of claret and deep rose, with blue mysteriously suggested over the whole, omnipresent as the faintest of tints, like the whiff of onion in a good salad.

Unlike Farrer, Colette writes about food and plants to flavor food:

For the pickle jar, and in the earthenware keg where the mysterious mere of the vinegar slumbers and swells . . . . Late in the season, when the nasturtium sheds its flowers and puffs up its seeds, I would pack it off to join the button capers filched from Segonzac's caper bush, the plump stalks of sea fennel the aborted little melons, the puny carrots, a few stringy green beans, the verjuice grapes--a whole season's surplus stock which, giving up the idea of growing rich in sugar, would release its pale properties into the vinegar, in hopes of later brightening up the melancholy of cold veal and breaking down the last resistance of a big salt beef.

The sea fennel Colette writes about is "samphire," a plant of rocky seasides and marshes.

Though the photo of Colette is obviously a publicity shot, I like to think she is studying some marvelous thing to which to devote herself so she may describe it.

The Lady in White: Describing

If I were to teach writing again, I'd call the course, "Description," and ask my students to do nothing but describe. Louis Agassiz is reported to have put a student in a room with a fish in a tank, pen and a notebook; the student was to observe the fish and take notes for three months. Even if I could, I wouldn't follow Agassiz's example, but I would ask my students to observe and write. I'd like them to forget themselves, and look outward.

If we gaze long enough, our prose may open to metaphor.

Early this morning--and it's always, as I've said, at three o'clock--I read again Henry James's story, "The Beast in the Jungle." It made me shudder even more this time around. James is so good on the life not lived. He also lets himself go in this description of May Bartram:

"Almost as white as wax, with the marks and signs in her face as numerous and as fine as if they had been etched by a needle, with soft white draperies relieved by a faded green scarf on the delicate tone of which the years had further refined, she was the picture of a serene and exquisite but impenetrable sphinx, whose head, or indeed all whose person, might have been powdered with silver. She was a sphinx, yet with her white petals and green fronds she might have been a lily too--only an artificial lily, wonderfully imitated and constantly kept, without dust or stain, though not exempt from a slight droop and complexity of faint creases, under some clear glass bell."

She's fated to die, of course, seeming already like an apparition. She might have lived--all the white and pale green turned to pink--if John Marcher had understood how much she loved him, and loved her in return. But now I'm straying from description.

Cather's "Two Friends": Street in Moonlight

Some readers of fiction have no patience with description of place, and skip ahead to the action, the point where the plot resumes, speeding along on its smooth tracks. For them, finely written description is superfluous. Not for me: I linger. Cather's description of a street scene in "Two Friends" may be a chance excrescence thrown off by the plot, like a spandrel, the space created when an arch is erected. (Stephen Jay Gould in his brilliant essay on the spandrel explains why some biological events seem to have no use. They are by productions of a successful adaptation, like the seemingly useless spandrel. The arch is necessary; it must be there for support; the spandrel is not, but artists find a decorative use for the empty space.)

Yet Cather's story would flatten out and gray without its rich description. Each night the friends sit talking in a matrix that reveals the pleasure of their friendship:

"One could distinguish their features, the stripes on their shirts, the flash of Mr. Dillon's diamond; but their shadows made two dark masses on the white sidewalk. The brick wall behind them, faded almost pink by the burning of successive summers, took on a carnelian hue at night. Across the street, which was merely a dusty road, lay an open space, with a few stunted box-elder trees, where the farmers left their wagons and teams when they came to town. Beyond this space stood a row of frail wooden buildings, due to be pulled down any day; tilted, crazy with outside stairs going up to rickety second-storey porches that sagged in the middle. They had once been white but were now grey, with faded blue doors along the wavy upper porches. These abandoned buildings, an eyesore by day, melted together into a curious pile in the moonlight, came an immaterial structure of velvet-white and glossy blackness, with here and there a faint smear of blue door, or a tilted patch of sage-green that had once been a shutter.

The road . . . in front of the sidewalk where I sat and played jacks, would be ankle-deep in dust, and seemed to drink up the moonlight . . ."

The failure of Trueman and Dillon's friendship drains the moonlight from Cather's story, and the loss registers more strongly because once they had sat and talked in a place "flooded by the rich indolence of a full moon, or a half-moon set in uncertain blue."